"Carl Van Vechten is one of the relatively few people in America to write about music neither as a press agent nor as a pedant, but as an essayist.... 'Music After the Great War' and 'Music and Bad Manners' are delightful reading whether the reader is a musician or not. 'Music and Bad Manners' ranges from a pretty thorough, if discursive, outline of the national music of Spain to the collection of lively anecdotes forming the essay from which the volume takes its name. The comments, always shrewd and based on wide experience, betray the rare quality of clear and independent thought. Moreover, Mr. Van Vechten, by the more than occasional heterodoxy of his ideas, stimulates a healthy desire to climb out of deep-worn ruts. The essays, in particular, on present musical tendencies are none the less illuminating because they are never ponderous.... The charm of the book is mainly due to the author's keen enjoyment of the grotesque, illustrated in scores of incisive phrases, and in a wealth of vivid anecdote."--Henry Adams Bellows in "The Bellman." "This very interesting book is in the style of the essays of Charles Lamb. It breathes a very human spirit and is told in a very entertaining fashion. It is in the form of a series of essays and from the opening one regarding bad manners in music and musicians to the closing article on Leo Ornstein it is spicy and intensely personal in its style. Really it is one of the most interesting, as well as thoughtful and yet expository, books I have seen."--"The Music News." "Of all the books that have been sent to me this past musical year none is so entertaining as 'Music and Bad Manners,' a little work in a violent green cover with a vivid blue edge from the house of Knopf. Mr. Van Vechten is a delightful young iconoclast who writes things about music that many people think but very few have courage enough to say, and his exaggerations so often contain trenchant truths, his style is so easy and merry, his ideas so sprightly, that you, if you are at all in sympathy with the 'moderns' will have a most agreeable hour if you devote it to this work."--"The Baltimore Evening Sun."